Ayn Rand Quotes

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?

Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it - walk.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned.

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others.

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

The government was set to protect man from criminals, and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government.

We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.

Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.

The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional the formula of realistic necessity is You must, if and the if stands for man's choice

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started.

"Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

Contrary to the vulgar belief that men are motivated primarily by materialistic considerations, we now see the capitalist system being discredited and destroyed all over the world, even though this system has given men the greatest material comforts.

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

America's abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

Capitalism is our only moral system. All other systems take advantage of man's rights and liberties.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.